The future of GNOME - an interesting subject. GNOME 3 has been out and about for a while, and it hasn't exactly been a smashing success. One of the efforts to take GNOME to the next level is what the team refers to as GNOME OS - but in reality, it's a set of improvements to GNOME that are just as interesting to GNOME-the-desktop-environment.

I have, and I can say with some confidence that it doesn't work at all. It takes ten minutes to start, and when it's finished starting none of the widgets respond to mouse clicks because the CPU is too busy cranking away doing nothing useful. And mind you, this is with maybe a dozen KB of swap space being used - it actually fits into 192 MB of RAM, but it's too much for the CPU and GPU.

Xfce on the other hand works fine, as does Mate. Not fast, but completely usable.

It seems to me like some developers are coding as if there's no such thing as limited processing power. Which would be okay except for the bad economy, the environmental cost of upgrades, and the untold amounts of blood, sweat, and tears that go into the manufacture of each new computer...

It's free software. What the developers do with it is their prerogative. Whether what they do is actually a good idea is an entirely different matter IMHO. Personally I hope that projects like Mate and Xfce take off like there's no tomorrow, and leave the more "modern" desktops in the dust... But that's just me.